The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: The Devil’s Brother

  • Louise Carver

    Mary Louise Stieger (1869-1956) began her performing career singing grand opera, and made her first screen appearance in 1908, in a very abbreviated version of Macbeth (she played Lady Macbeth).

    She worked more steadily in films from 1916 on, usually in minor roles in comedies, frequently uncredited. One of her credited appearances was as El Brendel’s mother-in-law in The Big Trail (1930).

    In the same year she appeared in Free and Easy, without credit. Her one other musical at MGM was The Devil’s Brother. 

  • Harry Bernard

    Harry Bernard (1878-1940) was a member of the Mack Sennett comedy stable and a regular collaborator with Laurel and Hardy for Hal Roach. It was in this capacity that he made appearances in The Rogue Song, The Devil’s Brother and The Bohemian Girl. Bernard can also be spotted as a baseball spectator in They Learned About Women. 

  • Laurel & Hardy

    Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890-1965) and Norvell Hardy (1892-1957), the most acclaimed of all comedy duos, were not MGM contract players; they worked for producer Hal Roach. But, from 1927, Roach released his pictures through Metro, which is how the pair came to be included in two of the studio’s all-star pictures: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Hollywood Party.

    Laurel and Hardy were also roped in to provide comic relief to The Rogue Song. Their sequences were filmed separately under Roach’s supervision and intercut with the main story.

    The pair also starred in versions of four operettas, with plots adapted to suit their style: The Devil’s Brother, Babes in Toyland , The Bohemian Girl and Swiss Miss.

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